


Compromise

by AndaisQ (orphan_account)



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: AU, Androgyny, Gen, Misgendering, Post-Scratch, Single Parents, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-09
Updated: 2012-04-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/AndaisQ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose Lalonde is a single mother, raising on a laughable income the daughter she found in the smoldering crater of a liquor store. She escapes by writing trashy little stories, encouraged by a mysterious grey-texted observer. But her life is about to get turned upside-down, in a good way- if she'll let it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Compromise

**Author's Note:**

> I LIVE!!!!! Jeez, it's been like a month and a half... there are cobwebs in my account.
> 
> So, to give you an idea of my general writing speed? When I started this story, the idea of Rose raising Roxy as she herself was raised was generally accepted canon.
> 
> Eeyup.
> 
> Anyway, when that was Jossed I decided "fuck it, I'll be publishing soon enough and I can explain that I started before the update! Everybody'll be doing it!"
> 
> I'll just leave this here and run away, then. As usual, it's horribly paced and as its perpetrator I should be shot.

_Zazzerpan of the Snowy Beard looked stonily at the androgynous gunmetal-skinned youth before him. Calmasis looked back, defiant and aloof. **let's see how long the condescending bastard lasts this time...**  
After a few long seconds, though, a viridescent viper writhed out of ciir collar and ce jumped at the tickling of its scales. Ce hissed at it to get back in, chagrined that it had undermined ciir stoicism._

_Zazzerpan resolved that since the child had been set off balance, he should take the advantage and the lead. He cleared his throat and spoke in a commanding tone. "You are aware, I am sure, of the reason you have been called here." He steepled his wrinkled fingers and looked over them, icy blue eyes hard and questioning._

_Calmasis raised a chalk-white eyebrow, already recovered. " well, to be qUite honest, i'm not. care to enlighten yoUr cUrioUs stUdent? i'm all ears, love." The serpent slithered silently back out of ciir shirt, wrapping around the back of ciir neck. Ce let it this time, now that ce was prepared to use it properly. Ce scratched it behind the ears, terrifying the ophidiophobic headmaster, and made a mental tickmark. **bingo. point, impudent youth.**_

_The elder cursed his own foolishness. He should have stuck to his initial strategy, unbalancing it by waiting for it to make the first move. Though if he'd done that, it would have just looked at him like he was a fool. Damn it, he couldn't win! "The incident in your Summoning class?"  
It looked at him like he was a fool.  
 **Damn it!**_

_" do yoU mean the sUmmoning that i did? becaUse if i recall correctly, that's rather what we're sUpposed to be doing in that class. it being, yoU know, the sUmmoning class." Ce risked a smirk, banking on ciir dignity from this conversation being enough to make it sardonic rather than merely impudent.  
There was a vein standing out on that liver-spotted pate. The smirk grew, and another line was drawn on an invisible blackboard._

_" wwell yes, but you're not supposed to be summonin fluthlu!" He was losing ground fast. Damn this impudent creature, it knew all his buttons! He was even losing his painstakingly cultured accent, and he'd spent forever on that! He regained the affectation with difficulty, and made a deliberate jab at a perceived weak point. "The apocalypse, **Mister** Umbrae, is not a desired outcome."  
Irritation flashed across its face. "i am not 'mister' Umbrae, madame." Its hand flew to its mouth, as though it was embarrassed over its obviously deliberate "mistake". "oh, i'm sorry. yoU don't sUbscribe to that gender. i wonder how i coUld possibly have forgotten."  
He gritted his teeth and fought to hold on._

_"Then why do you never tell me your gender? It's common courtesy, and if I knew, I would be less likely to forget your sex as you would be less likely to 'forget' mine."  
Calmasis narrowed ciir eyes. **presUmptUoUs dotard. yoU're on thin ice, you senile old codger.** Ce pronounced ciir words carefully, as though speaking to one of slow mind. " i have told yoU that i do not follow yoUr oppressive binary, and yoU woUld do well to remember it if yoU wish Us to remain on even the most vagUely cordial terms. i have given perfectly sUitable pronoUns, and will give no groUnd in this matter."  
Ce then smiled in a way that less displayed amusement than bared ciir teeth. "Unless, of coUrse, yoU just find them too difficUlt for yoUr famed intellect to parse? do my grammatical constrUcts so perplex the defeater of the thoUsand sphinxes of baron tUring? i can try to come Up with some less elaboUrate ones, if yoU like."_

_It knew him too damn well. He was going purple, and frothy flecks flew from his furious mouth. " i shouldnt havve to parse them! the rest a us mako do wwith the standard set! wwhy are you makin evverythin so much remora difficult?!" The wwavves obviously weren't going away, and they'd brought the eleven-by-eleven-damned puns that he'd not spoken since he was barely past infancy. He tore himself out of their grasp, with partial success. "This is getting us nowhere. Go back to your towwer and stay there until your sanction is determined, and fry to consider why you're being punished, if considering objectivve morality isn't too much work."  
It gave him a thin, cold smile. "gladly. i hope yoU can come to a decision soon, as i do get bored so very easily. and i get the feeling yoU woUldn't like my methods of staving off tediUm."  
He just flung his hand, trembling finger outstretched, toward the door, not trusting himself to speak without embarrassing himself._

Rose stared at the paper on the glass table in front of her, covered in embellished script and purple prose (both figurative and literal). A snatch of Beethoven's Sixth played, causing Roxy to turn over in her black crib, and she pulled out her PDA. A grey-texted message popped up on the screen.  
yoU've really oUtdone yoUrself, darling. it's trUly inspired. i love this "calmasis" person; ce seems somehow...familiar? uPu (do excUse the sideways tongUe as UsUal)  
Well, that was nice of ciir. UU was always full of encouragement for her writing, even when it was unadulterated crap. She wasn't certain how ce saw her writing, but she had been assured that ciir spying was benign and impossible to prevent, and after extensive investigation she had seen nothing to belie that. She had better things to worry about.  
Thank you for your comforting lies, Umbra, they're very kind. And yes, you may have noted some passing similarity between a certain young androgyne and yourself. Purely coincidental, I assure you. Not that I really need the "resemblance to persons living or dead" disclaimer, as the book will be published over the collective dead body of Calliope, Melpomene, and Thalia. (Yes, all three of them; it does tend to mix genres, as you'll note.)  
This was drafted in about thirty seconds and sent after a moment of proof-reading. She was about to turn back to her writing, smirking, when her screen blinked again. She narrowed her eyes; she was certain she'd beaten her opponent on speed that time. Damn it.  
well, i woUldn't say that! miracles have been known to occUr in this field, after all. and i don't think that yoUr hUman mUses woUld object so strenUoUsly to sUch a UniqUe and sUbversive take on that tired old "wizard school" cliché.  
You sound like you've rehearsed that last bit. What, have you been plugging it to Crocker Books?  
and what if i have?  
She was about to respond, probably with something along the lines of "pull the other one, it's got bells on", when there was a tentative knock at the door. She tapped out "I'll be back momentarily." and walked over to the entrance of her 12-by-12 cell of an apartment.  
It stuck, as it tended to when it rained, and so she wrenched at it with both hands and all the might in her not-particularly-mighty frame. Naturally, the heavy wood gave way, flew inward at terminal velocity, and smashed her right in the face. She fell to the floor, concrete with a rather nice rug over it, and swore bloody and/or terrible vengeance against the door and its family while Roxy bawled in the background, woken by the noise.  
Rose continued her invective for almost a quarter of a minute until she recalled that she had opened the damn thing because someone was outside. She quickly scrambled to her feet and dusted off her abominably pink sweater, looking up to see a disdainful white-haired suit and his wheelchaired lackey staring at her.  
She arched her own eyebrow through the pain, not to be outdone. They were deadlocked for a few seconds before Roxy's wails forced her to withdraw. She picked her adoptive daughter up, stroked her glassy hair and kissed the top of her head. "Shoosh, dear Hart. Shooosh."  
Looking up at the dignified gentleman, she resumed their silent combat, waving them in as she heated up a bottle of milk. The minion was sweating somewhat and wiping his palms on his trousers, to her amusement. _He's probably a novice whatever-they-are. Can't even take a good thousand-yard stare._  
The milk was prepared before they had said a word, speaking less to the power of her elderly though selfless microwave than to the depth of the atmosphere in the room. Once the girl was situated on the coffee table sucking on her meal and Rose had a cup of tea in her hand (bagged; she was after all on a budget, though her soul wept at the bastardization), she finally broke the silence. "Well, we've hardly got the time to natter on like this. Enough small talk, get to the point."  
The sweating man jumped at her voice. _Only the torso moves; paralysis it is, then. ___The non-sweating man smiled thinly. She noticed that he looked to be blind in one eye, which was blank ivory-white where the other was an improbably bright green. She disliked him on instinct. "You have just the sense of humor your stories would suggest, Miss Lalonde. Which brings me to why we're here."  
He held out a business card. "I'm Docart Kratz, and this is my...colleague, Martin Bolivar. We represent Crocker Books, which received and read over the draft of your story, _Complacency of the Learned_." She froze, holding her cup carefully so she wouldn't accidentally snap the handle or throw the cup in his smug face. "We decided after some consideration that even though it was incomplete, it–"  
She held up a slightly shaking hand, palm out. "I have never sent in a story of mine to any publisher. I never would. My writing is solely a recreational pursuit, and always has been."  
Genuine surprise showed on his face, an occurrence she suspected to be rare. "Are you cert- wait, that's intensely stupid, of course you are. How would anyone even–"  
He shook his head. "Regardless, I was sent to inform you that we were willing to publish the book. Now that you know we had it," he threw in a wry smirk, "do you want it made?"

She stared at him, mouth hanging open, then straightened up and thought it over. What could this mean?  
She never had enough money, of course; she was a single mother with no family, and her credit rating was practically in the negatives. The final set of foster parents had given her some money when she'd left, and the salary from her librarian job would have been sufficient on her own, but then she'd had to go and find a baby who looked like her in a crater like her own. And, of course, under the circumstances she couldn't just leave her in the vodka-soaked wreckage to go to some loveless purgatory as she had. So walking out of the registrar's bureau with the newly-christened Roxy under her arm, she'd resigned herself to ramen, candles, and frantic gambits to catch her fiscal breath.  
She'd quit taking her classes at the community college, taken more hours at the library and gratefully accepted its free daycare for employees' children, and even moonlighted as a model, sometimes nude, to supplement her paycheck when money was particularly tight. Altogether, she'd done well enough, and the two of them had lived almost in comfort for the first year-and-a-bit of the girl's life.  
But this...this could surpass all of that. Crocker Books had a branch in every country in the world, even the ones with a three-percent literary rate, just because they could. One book with Crocker had made Billy Mays famous, and up to then he'd just been yelling "facts" in shitty infomercials. She'd have more than enough money to raise Roxy, to go to college in whatever college she wanted, to live in a different country every month of the year for a decade if she wanted to.  
This could set her up for life. Hell, it wouldn't even stop there, this could set her up for the _afterlife_ ; when she died they'd put her in a pyramid with mummified servants and have her body blessed by the Dalai Lama and the Pope.  
Not that any of it would help, since she would have sold her soul to Crocker.  
And there was the bottom line, the crux of the matter. She'd have all that in exchange for her soul. Because Crockercorp didn't publish books; they published industries. They'd surgically remove all depth, they'd smooth over the subtlety, and they'd kill any controversy they couldn't spin into a sales boost. And her book was her, in a way; if she gave away its integrity, she lost her own.  
The money couldn't buy that back.

She looked him in the eye and shook her head slowly. "I've seen what your company does to books, Mr. Kratz. You've turned many a story that had true potential into crowd-pleasing schlock with the barest vestiges of greatness. I never planned to make my work into anything more by publishing it, and this can only make it less." She lifted her chin defiantly.  
The agent gritted his teeth, obviously put out that they wouldn't be getting her in their stable (was her work really that good? She preened inwardly) then smoothed over his face and stood. "Well, Miss Lalonde, I'm afraid we have been misled. Through no fault of either party, we came to cross-purposes, and like so many other _young women_ I have tried to work with, your morals overshadow your best interests." Sneering, he motioned his wheeled friend to come with him and began to stride out.  
Instead of following, however, the young Mr. Bolivar rolled over and whispered to him, looking at him with puppy-dog eyes. Kratz pinched the bridge of his nose and said, "Fine. Just don't take too long." The younger man looked like he would be dancing a jig if his legs worked, and the elder's exit became more petulant than stormy.  
Martin wheeled about anxiously, as though unable to find the spot he had been sitting moments before. Considering the size of the room, it really shouldn't have been that hard.  
Finally figuring it out, he slowly released his hands from his rims. He bit his lip and opened his mouth several times before closing it in embarrassment. He blushed brightly, lighting up his face in almost primary red.  
She just looked at him blandly, intimidating as a full regiment of mothers-in-law without even needing to glare. There was a minute or so of this, the only sound Roxy's suckling in the background. Finally, squeezing his eyes shut, he said so rapidly as to be almost incoherent, "You did write it, even though you didn't s-send it in? The story, w-with Calmasis and her conflict with Zazzerpan the Learned?"  
Rolling her eyes inwardly at the man's pronoun misuse, she nodded. "It was a parody of that absurd Rowling woman's 'Philosopher's Stone,' which I personally consider international literary crime even without your idiotic title change. And Calmasis isn't female, as you would probably know if you had actually read the manuscript and it left the slightest impression."  
Cringing, he stammered out.,"W-well, I just got a bit too caught up in the story to notice, I guess. I just really liked...h-him?"  
She sighed. "Ciir. The pronoun is 'ciir'. Ce doesn't follow the gender binary."  
His face twisted in confusion, but he pressed on gamely. "Okay, it's j-just that, like, I wanted to be friends with... ceer?" She nodded tiredly. "Because he – Ce. Ce seemed... nice."  
She stared, dumbfounded. _'Nice'? Is he only pretending to have read the book, or is he just that stupid?_  
He saw her thoughts in her face and his eyes filled with tears, which he tried to hide by hanging his head. "I'm, I'm making an idiot of myself, I'll go away."  
He started to roll himself out of the room miserably. She felt guilty about her uncalled-for harshness; after all, it was Kratz who had offended her. Bolivar probably hadn't even chosen to be his partner. He wasn't even so stupid, just-  
Before Rose could finish her thought, Roxy finished her milk and flung the bottle at him. It struck him in the temple, and he toppled out of his chair, landing on the floor in a crumpled heap.

Fortunately, the crumpled heap broke his fall. For once, Rose was glad she didn't have the time to do laundry reliably.  
She jumped off of the couch, running over to him. She grabbed his shoulder, about to shake him before she remembered he had been hit in the head, and turned him over as gently as possible. She tried to remember her first aid lessons, failed, and swore at length.  
Prodding the affected area, she found no difference in texture to the rest of his head. "Is that a thing you do? Check the texture of the injury?" she said under her breath. Roxy burbled noncommittally.  
"Do I elevate his legs? I think I'm supposed to elevate his legs. But wouldn't that increase blood flow to the injury? Isn't that what you don't want to happen? Wait, those are prosthetic. Should I do it anyway?" She contemplated elevating one and leaving the other down. Then she realized that doing that would be moronic. Roxy agreed emphatically, scolding her with a strident "BA!"  
She remembered after some ponderation that she should probably try to wake him up. She tweaked his arm lightly, then pinched viciously and twisted until the skin went white. He groaned, swatted feebly at her hand, and opened his eyes.  
He sat up unsteadily on the floor, and she sat back, kneeling upright. "Oh, thank God. Are you concussed?"  
He blinked at her. "Huh?"  
Concussion tests, concussion tests... Oh! She pulled out her phone, turned on the camera-flash LED, and waved it in front of his face. He winced and turned away, raising a hand to cover his eyes, and she realized that she didn't remember which result meant "concussion" as opposed to "no concussion" as opposed to "get that thing out of my face, you crazy bint."  
He raised his non-shielding hand timidly, like she was a schoolteacher. "Um, please put away the light? It's, it's bothering my eyes."  
She put it back in her pocket hurriedly. Well, that was a clear enough answer. It didn't tell her what she needed to know, but it was clear.  
Wait! She did remember another test. "Who's the president?"  
He screwed up his face in concentration. "Um, Neil Patrick Harris? I didn't, uh, follow the last e-election that closely."  
"That's wise; it's become an unabashed media circus, not that it ever wasn't. But you are correct." She smiled brightly. "I give you a clean bill of health; you don't have a concussion, but you're going to have a pretty nasty lump from Roxy's attack. See an actual doctor about it." She patted him on the head and pulled herself off the floor, dusted herself off, and offered him a hand.  
He looked at her, then at his metallic legs, one of which had come partly off and was weighing down his trousers. He looked back up. "I don't, uh, think that's going to help that much." He thought for a moment. "Thanks, though."  
She brought both hands to her face, burning with embarrassment. "All right, so the problem here is apparently that I'm stupid. Am I supposed to pick you up? Is that what we're doing here?"  
"I-if you don't mind? This position isn't especially, um, comfortable."  
She circled him, cringing inwardly. "Okay, so, I'll just-" She scooped him up and quickly deposited him back in his chair before she could think about the _touching someone_ part of the process.  
He settled in. "Okay, um, I can go now, like I was planning. Does your baby have any more p-projectiles?"  
She crossed over to Roxy, picking her up and cradling her now-sleeping form. "I think I can avert any further assaults. Go, I'll hold her off," she said with a wry smile.  
He looked like he wanted to banter, but felt awkward and uncertain. He bit his lip for a few seconds, then waved jerkily and rolled out.  
She put the baby back in her crib, then sat back down on the couch and thought, crunched in a terrible posture but unable to bring herself to care.

A few minutes later, she made her decision. She stood up elegantly and navigated her way across the carpet to the door. He couldn't have gotten far; she was on the fifth floor, and the elevators were thoroughly sub-par.  
Walking with purpose and long strides, she made it down to the ground floor just as he exited the front door. She called to him, "Wait! Martin!"  
He paused, hand on the button, and turned himself back. "What?"  
"Tell me about the deal."


End file.
